https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings
Wee video here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/11195...
Honestly I think our Police do a lot of good. There's some bad apples, there's complaints - but that is normal. Overall, they tend to make good judgement calls (most of the time).
To the defence of the US, sometimes their system does work: https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/11/24/us-jury-charge-police-off... honestly though, shooting a guy in a car that wasn't in immediate danger to anyone else around him (he rung the police originally because he was having a mental health crisis - in NZ you do call the cops if you can) so they shoot him with beanbag rounds, tase him then shoot him six times fatally. A bit over the top...
[caution: good-natured linguistic pedantry follows. Apologies in advance!]
As a point of interest, this usage of "bad apple" derives from the old folk wisdom: "one bad apple spoils the bunch".
Unlike quite a lot of old folk wisdom, this saying is literally true: mold growing on one apple will quickly jump to and colonise other nearby apples, and overripe apples emit a gas which causes other nearby fruit to ripen (and then overripen) much faster than normal; so it's important not to store overripe/moldy apples together with regular fruit!
Anyhow, my point is just this: "bad apples" doesn't mean that something is in the minority and therefore doesn't have much effect and can be safely ignored -- it means that something is in the minority but is likely to infect everything around it if urgent action isn't taken to separate them. If that wasn't your intended meaning, then "bad apples" was definitely the wrong metaphor to reach for. :)
Right, no disagreement from me that these things happen. And responses are varied, as you say.
What I was trying to get across was that you get a very lopsided view by concentrating on "crazy shit" and people's responses to it.
For example:
I live in the US. It's snowing where I am. It makes things beautiful. Some birds are at the feeder, and the furnace just turned on. I'm thankful for the warmth. I have some cookies to deliver to the neighbors later on (they recently gave us a loaf of their bread, which was delicious).
----
There you go, that was some real American culture (still second-hand for you, and admittedly not entirely representative). Not very interesting, but it's home. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of people, and yes, sprinkle in a handful of crazy shit too for good measure. Maybe that gets you a little bit closer to reality.
Still plenty that needs fixing, of course. And I'm glad I don't live in Mississippi (:
You may as well read "Florida man" headlines and come to conclude that all 20 million people in the state are crazed meth heads brandishing alligators as weapons at gas station clerks to rob cigarette cartons. The rare sensational shit is what gets reported, not normal mundane everyday life.
You are very poorly informed and confidently blind to your biases.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It comes from reading/listening/etc the responses of Americans to all the crazy shit that happens there. There are factual things that happen. They are talked about, Americans are talking about them, I listen. That is first hand experience of the American culture I talked about.
Here is the thing. The Americans I meet, you should see how embarrassed they are when you start talking about the latest American stuff you've seen. The faces of the Americans I worked with when I talked about the time the cops shoot up a stolen UPS van in the middle of the highway killing everyone including the hostage and endangered the lives of random drivers who couldn't get away. Like they know that stuff happens. And at the same time, there are Americans I've met personally and talked to frequently online who would defend that. "They stole it, they couldn't risk the lives of the police officers", etc.
When talking about culture problems, how Americans act is first hand experience.